Surrealism for Kids

If Surrealism and Photoshop were on facebook, I imagine they would be friends exchanging seemingly improbable realities and concepts in text and image. Dada would be a lazy friend, more like a long time lurker than a regular poster. And every poet with a laptop and an ISP would be inspired by their juxtapositions. 

Art Haters would set up a counter-site explaining why P'shop and Surrealism are not REAL ART, while media pundits and bar room gurus would expound on what-it-all-means. Bombers with cans would spray slogans for one side or the other in public places. There would be a spin off project licensed to cheap third world labour to produce limited edition fashionable items and then the whole scene would descend into chaos and infighting when the key players take up the fat life surrounded by acolytes and Rewriters-of-History. I expect music to remain, inspired by the inevitable crazy change in cultural alliances.

"I met a girl who sang the blues

And I asked her for some happy news,

But she just smiled and turned away.

I went down to the sacred store

Where I’d heard the music years before,

But the man there said the music wouldn’t play."

from American Pie by Don McLean 1971 

Decades later, tax payers' dollars would be diverted away from digging huge holes on sacred sites by those with leverage (and a social conscience) and into acquiring this old skool aRt for public display - something like the current Surrealism Exhibition at our local Dirty Big Gallery - Surrealism for the whole family. Check it out. See what all the fuss is about and as Banksy would say "exit via the gift shop". Then make some art of your own or at least write a cultural manifesto.

"And if you hear vague traces 

Of skipping reels of rhyme

To your tambourine in time

It's just a ragged clown behind

I wouldn't play it any mind

It's just a shadow you're seein'

That he's chasing"

from Mr Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan 1965 

"What's this all got to do with the surf?"

I hear you say.

"There is a man cut in two by a window"

from the Surrealist Manifesto 1924 by Andre Breton